Business opportunity identification through dynamic information management in collaborative business ventures

Globalization, technological change and an increasing demand for specialization has led to new economic activities, new business models and new value propositions. As enterprises struggle to react to these changes, they realize that they need to increase their engagement in new venture development. This, in turn, entails the development of collaboration capabilities with business partners, leading to the creation of collaboration networks for exploiting new opportunities and engaging in value innovation. Hence, the capability to seamlessly interoperate and co-create with other enterprises is increasingly becoming a key business asset for promoting entrepreneurship within an ecosystem of business entities. The raison d' etre for such an ecosystem is the exchange and use of resources among partners through service interfaces, in order to collectively assess and exploit a business opportunity. In this context, a number of challenges emerge: a) how can participants control dissemination of their resources? b) how can they design services for contributing controlled resources to the collaborative venture? c) how can they assess the potential value created in such a network, before fully engaging? In order to address these challenges, we developed and present in this paper a service classification framework for value co-creation activities. The major contribution of this framework is that it can help a service provider to: a) understand its options when engaging in a collaborative relationship for exploiting new business opportunities; b) assess the infrastructure gaps (organizational, business, technical) between what an option requires and what the provider already has; c) identify a service development roadmap based on a structure (service profile) that encompasses key requirements and prerequisites for successful provision. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection peer-review under responsibility of The 2nd International Conference on Integrated Information